The Rolling Stone Interview: Robin Williams

He is still a kamikaze of the night. In the cockpit of his blue four-wheel-drive vehicle, he purrs through the hushed, sloping arteries of San Francisco, seeking out comedy huts to raid, improve stages to commandeer. He never strikes before midnight, never allows word of his attack to leak out in advance. He likes it that way. It is the only instant gratification he permits himself nowadays, the only vice he has not sworn off. "Joke 'em if they can't take a fuck," he has said, not a little ruefully. Laughs are all that is left, and laughs are what he craves most Okay, maybe laughs and a thriving movie career, but we'll get to that.

Robin Williams lives in San Francisco. His family migrated to the Bay Area From the Midwest when he was a teenager, and now he has come home to stay, to reclaim normalcy in his life. He has vanquished the demons that had ravaged his reputation: drugs, liquor, womanizing. His primary motivation was the birth of his son, Zachary, who is now nearly five. But despite fatherhood's cleansing effect, his nine-year marriage to Valerie Velardi is in disrepair. They have been separated — on amicable terms — for more than a year, with no resolution on the horizon. (William's father died last October, compounding last October compounding the inner turmoil.) Williams now keeps company with his personal assistant, Marsha Garces, a petite brunette. It is she, in fact, who unfailingly rides copilot during his nocturnal comedy missions.

On successive nights in mid-January, they zero in on a pair of favorite targets: an upscale north-of-North-Beach club called Cobb's and a scruffy Richmond District walk-in closet called the Holy City Zoo. The latter is where it all began for Williams, where he worked his way from behind the bar to the stage These days Williams, ever the polite interloper, will not lunge for the microphone until all of the scheduled comics have finished their sets. He lingers outside or on a secluded bar stool — usually with a hood yanked down over his forehead — nursing his anonymity before moving in for the kill.